Word: bizarro
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...outlets, mom-and-pop shops and name-brand superstores. The goal is not a "themed" simulacrum of honky-tonk diversity but the real thing. Such a splendidly oxymoronic turn: a municipal code for discouraging tastefulness, a quarter-billion dollars spent to conjure a trashy Damon Runyon spirit. The Bizarro-world rules call for, among other things, giant loudspeakers blasting onto the street, commercial signs noticeably out of alignment with their neighbors and virtually no size limit for billboards. "The bigger and noisier," says Stern, "the better...
...mystery remains. The unpalatable graffiti and tastless toys didn't wreck my vacation, but they did rein in my tendency to describe Barcelona as an urban Magic Kingdom with the Sagrada Familia as its bizarro Space Mountain. I couldn't conduct a poll of city residents and ask them whether they felt more whimsical than other Spaniards, but I'm convinced that Barcelona's smirky attitude is more than mere packaging. Yet it's mixed in with something ugly, and nothing! observed gave me any means of teasing the swagger apart from the dark cloud...
World's fairs have traditionally been epicenters of earnestness. Expo '92 must be the first with strong whiffs of deliberate irony and in-your-face perversity. The Red Cross, of all people, has erected one of the edgiest, most bizarro world pavilions of all, with red steel I beams shooting past thin white metal uprights at queer angles, red brick walls zigzagging crazily. Deconstructivism, a fading fad, has found its perfect project not a moment too soon: according to an Expo spokeswoman, the architecture is an allusion to the Red Cross's role in assisting victims of earthquakes...
...August could be labeled Presumed Interesting. Moviegoers are looking for something different, and they may have already found it in the postmortem romantic thriller Ghost or the eye-spider horror comedy Arachnophobia. Presumed Innocent hopes to corner the serious market. Even David Lynch is invading summertime with his bizarro-world Wild at Heart. Each hopes to duplicate the surprise-hit status of last summer's When Harry Met Sally, Dead Poets Society, Parenthood and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids...
Schoonover is one of two vaulters in the meet who have cleared 15 ft. 6 in. The other is Villanova's Vince Bizarro, who has made...